FanHouse DirecTV

I live in the Cincinnati area and was enjoying watching the Super Bowl in HD on Fox affiliate WXIX. Then 8:30 pm hit ... and the screen went black (well, white and varying shades of blue). No more Super Bowl for me! I just read FanHouse Ryan Wilson's post that people were losing their Super Bowl signals across the country and I was praying to god that I wasn't going to be next.

Not quite.

DirecTV threw up a graphic saying "To see the Super Bowl in HD, please tune to channel 701". I did and there was the Super Bowl in HD. Still, how odd is that? Why switch channels like that midstream?

One reason it pissed me off is because I was recording the game on my DVR for future viewing. Now, I have about 2 1/2 quarters on one recording and the rest on another. No biggie, but ...

... what if I wasn't home and was recording the game? If that was the case, I would have had that white and blue screen telling me that the Super Bowl I thought I was recording is now playing on a channel that (a) I didn't record and (b) isn't labeled. Channel 701 isn't really a channel; it's just used to give you times and stations were various sports games will be televised.

So, good luck to those with DirecTV that will come home to work and not see how the game ends.

MLB president Bob DuPuy [pictured right] plans to officially address the blackout troubles in front of the sport's powerful executive council two weeks from today at the quarterly owners meetings in New York. How seriously the eight-man council treats the concerns will go a long way toward proving whether baseball is serious about rewriting its archaic rules or simply raising the issue to muzzle all of the fans who are not allowed to buy the product baseball is selling.

... Well, in theory at least. The reality is much different. Some areas are blacked out from 40 percent of the games on a full schedule. No one in Iowa can watch the Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Royals, Twins and White Sox. Las Vegas has its own hexagon of darkness with the A's, Angels, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Giants and Padres.

Think about that. Baseball, which has made billions of dollars through MLB.com and its national television packages by knocking down the barriers that prevented mass consumption, is more than happy to ignore its own Great Wall.

Unfortunately, those rules don't make sense anymore, as Passan says. It's time for the MLB to move out of the Dark Ages like the rest of us, and open up the game to fans who seem to be desperately craving it.

"I've heard for years we have too much product out there," Selig said. "Everywhere I've gone ... there's no market that has less than 350 to 400 [televised] games, and some have quite a bit more than that. We have an enormous amount of product out there"

"Our chief goal throughout the process was to ensure that fans would have access to as many baseball games and as much baseball coverage as possible," said MLB President and Chief Operating Officer Bob DuPuy.

In Demand, owned by affiliates of the companies that own Time Warner, Comcast and Cox cable systems, said Wednesday it was agreeing to the terms and that its partners would carry The Baseball Channel when it launches in 2009 to at least the same number of subscribers who will get the channel on DirecTV.

"The communication sent to our office today by iN Demand is not responsive to that offer," he said. "In spite of their public comments, the response falls short of nearly all of the material conditions (among them requirements for carriage of The Baseball Channel and their share of the rights fees for Extra Innings) set forth in the Major League Baseball offer made to them on March 9."

[I]ndustry sources said DirecTV's exclusive hold on the package will only last the first three of the seven years of the deal, potentially opening up an opportunity for other carriers to get Extra Innings starting in the 2010 season.... could ease angry fan sentiment surrounding the DirecTV-MLB marriage.